Graduate Students

Dion Nataraja is a composer, experimental vocalist, and scholar from Indonesia. He graduated from Bennington College and is currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at UC Berkeley. His musical and scholarly works have been focusing on the intersection of areas such as Javanese gamelan, electroacoustic music, microtonality, instrument building, and critical theory. The composer-pianist Anthony Cheung described Dion’s music as “a true intercultural music for our time.” By the gamelan composer-performer Wahyu Thoyyib Pambayun, his music has been described as “succeeded in expanding the...

Mara focuses on opera staging and theories of acting. Her interests lie in how artistic process can be revealed to and noticed by audiences. She has a forthcoming article in Diderot Studies on theatrical asides in the Paradoxe sur le comédien and listening practices in the 18th-c. Parisian theater. She has presented at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference on backstage documentaries and at the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society on acting surprised. In Fall 2022, she and Collin Ziegler co-convened the conference Contemporary Opera on Stage: Institutions...